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Friedrich Jeckeln
Friedrich Jeckeln (February 2nd, 1895 – February 3rd, 1946) was a German Schutzstaffel commander during the Nazi era. He served as a Higher SS and Police Leader in the occupied Soviet Union during World War II. Jeckeln was the commander of one of the largest collection of Einsatzgruppen and was personally responsible for ordering and organizing the deaths of over 100,000 Jews, Slavs, Romani, and other "undesirables". After the end of World War II, Jeckeln was convicted for his crimes by a Soviet military tribunal in Riga, Latvia and executed in 1946. Background Jeckeln served in World War I as an officer. After being discharged following Germany's defeat, Jeckeln worked as an engineer before joining the Nazi Party on 1 October 1929. In January 1931, he was accepted into the Schutzstaffel (SS). By the end of 1931 he was placed in charge of a regiment and then a brigade. In 1932, Jeckeln was elected as a member of the Reichstag. In January 1933, when the Nazi Party came to power, Jeckeln was put in charge of SS group South. In 1936, he was appointed SS and Police Leader and later promoted to SS-''Obergruppenführer''. Jeckeln was known for ruthlessness and brutality. Political opponents, especially members of the KPD, SPD and the unions, were pursued relentlessly until their death. Together with party member Friedrich Alpers, Jeckeln was primarily responsible for the Rieseberg Murders in the summer of 1933. After the Second World War began, Jeckeln was transferred to the Waffen-SS. As was the practice in the SS, Jeckeln took a lower rank from his Allgemeine-SS position and served as an officer in Regiment 2 of the Totenkopf Division. In 1941, he was transferred by Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler to serve as Higher SS and Police Leader (HSSPF) of Southern, then later in 1941, of Northern Russia. In this role Jeckeln assumed control of all SS-''Einsatzgruppen'' mass killings and security operations in his district. Jeckeln developed a method of killing large numbers of people, over the course of the mass killings he had organised in the Ukraine, which included (amongst others) Babi Yar and the Kamianets-Podilskyi Massacre. First applied in the Rumbula Massacre on 30 November and 8 December 1941, the method (which became known as the "Jeckeln System") involved dividing staff into separate groups, each of which specialised in a separate part of the process: #The Security Service (SD) men rousted the people out of their houses in the Riga ghetto. #The people to be murdered (typically Jews) were organised into columns of 500-1,000 people; and driven to the killing grounds about 10 kilometres to the south. #The Order Police (Orpo) led the columns to the killing grounds. #3 pits where the killing would be done simultaneously had been dug in advance. #The victims were stripped of their clothing and valuables. #The victims were run through a double cordon of guards on the way to the killing pits. #The killers forced the victims to lie face down on the trench floor, or more often, on the bodies of the people who had just been shot. In order to save on the cost of bullets, each person was shot once in the back of the head with a Russian submachine gun. The shooters either walked among the dead in the trench, killing them from a range of 2 metres, or stood at the lip of the excavation and shot the prone victims below them. Anyone not killed outright was simply buried alive when the pit was covered up. By the end of August 1941, while commanding the Kommandostab SS First Brigade in Western Ukraine, Jeckeln had personally supervised the murder of more than 44,000 people, the largest total of Jews murdered that month. On 27 January 1942, Jeckeln was awarded the War Merit Cross with Swords for killing 25,000 at Rumbula "on orders from the highest level." In February 1945, now a General der Waffen-SS und Polizei, Jeckeln was appointed to command the SS-Freiwilligen-Gebirgs-Korps and also served as Commander of Replacement Troops and Higher SS and Police Leader in Southwest Germany. Jeckeln was taken prisoner by Soviet troops near Halbe on 28 April 1945. Along with other German personnel, he was tried before a Soviet military tribunal in the Riga Trial in Latvia from 26 January 1946 to 3 February 1946. During the investigation, he was calm, answering questions from investigators in essence, on the dock looked dull and impartial. Jeckeln and the other defendants were found guilty, sentenced to death and hanged at Riga on 3 February 1946 in front of some 4,000 spectators. Against popular misconception, the execution did not happen in the territory of the former Riga ghetto, but in Victory Square (Uzvaras laukums). 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